The campaign office of Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Hiroshi Hase, in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, is full of traditional campaign paraphernalia. The big, round daruma doll, eyeless, stands on the left, just to the side of the candidate’s photo. Above the photo is a little shrine.

The operation and location of election offices are tightly controlled by law. For instance, campaign offices must be more than 300 meters away from the nearest polling station.

JRT also found that while the bigger parties displayed the paraphernalia of traditional Japanese campaigns – from daruma dolls to shrines and endorsements — many of the smaller parties were making do with a lot less.

Traditional Japanese electioneering was on display in the office of seven-time Liberal Democratic Party lower house representative Nobuteru Ishihara in western Tokyo. The walls were crowded with endorsements from politicians and local business owners. In the back, a life-size cardboard likeness of the smiling politician rested under a shrine, and a bright red traditional daruma doll stood out starkly amid the dozens of black-and-white endorsement papers, its one painted eye peering out on the pristine office.

“If we win, then we will paint the other eye,” said a spokesman for the campaign, explaining that tradition calls for painting one of the doll’s eyes when wishing for something, and the other when the wish is fulfilled.

He said, however, that the daruma — once a mainstay in election offices — have become rarer as more people interpret the armless, legless and eyeless doll as offensive to physically handicapped people.

In the Japanese Communist Party office in the same district, 81-year-old Itsuro Yamaguchi sat eating his lunch and warming himself with a small heater, his black beret set at a rakish angle. A filmmaker who has worked with the party for many years, he showed JRT around a bare office that had only one large support poster, and another smaller one.

“We usually have more messages from supporters,” he said pointing to the smaller message — from a local women’s group. “But this time around things were pretty quiet.”

Though many offices that JRT visited were quiet on election day, the office of the small Greens Japan organization, which is supporting the candidacy of actor and anti-nuclear activist Taro Yamamoto, was buzzing. About fifteen volunteers worked the phones in the cramped office above a ramen shop in the Koenji neighborhood of Tokyo. Instead of the traditional endorsements from politicians, messages of encouragement from local children lined the walls.

“Hello, this is Taro Yamamoto’s office. Sorry to bother, but I was wondering if you had been to the polls…Oh you have? So sorry to call,” said one volunteer.

Masaya Koriyama, public relations manager for the party, explained that volunteers are only able to ask potential voters if they had been to the polls. Election law prohibits them from saying Mr. Yamamoto’s name, other than to introduce themselves as calling from his campaign office.

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Japan Real Time is a newsy, concise guide to what works, what doesn’t and why in the one-time poster child for Asian development, as it struggles to keep pace with faster-growing neighbors while competing with Europe for Michelin-rated restaurants. Drawing on the expertise of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, the site provides an inside track on business, politics and lifestyle in Japan as it comes to terms with being overtaken by China as the world’s second-biggest economy. You can contact the editors at japanrealtime@wsj.com